(1) Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to a system and method for managing processes. Specifically, the embodiments of the invention are related to a system and method for managing processes for Web services and similar business processes.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Efficient operation of a modern enterprise leverages automation and integration of business processes. At the same time, these business processes must be malleable to facilitate business agility in a dynamic marketplace. Traditional business integration solutions are expensive, brittle, monolithic and proprietary. The widespread initiative to adopt Web services is fueled by an understanding that effective business integration must be standards-based, non-proprietary, and technically grounded in a modular, loosely coupled architecture. Adopting a Web service orientation for business integration is both economically sound from a cost-saving point of view as well as strategically aligned with the business goal of increasing market responsiveness.
Both efficiency considerations and changing market conditions are driving the need for business process integration. Requirements of flexibility, interoperability, and cost-effectiveness point to service-oriented architectures based on Web service standards. These services need to be orchestrated to achieve business goals and business process execution language (BPEL) provides the standard for this orchestration.
Adherence to the design principle of loose coupling is a necessary but insufficient condition for a successful distributed architecture. A very pragmatic concern is conformance to industry standards. Without conformance to standards, a combination of monolithic home-grown solutions and vendor lock-in to proprietary solutions is inevitable. The collection of standards surrounding Web services is being overwhelmingly embraced by industry, supported through groups including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), and the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). In the context of Web service orchestration, the most important standard is BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), which is undergoing standardization in OASIS. BPEL provides a language for Web service orchestration in terms of processes and activities. The activities include primitive activities such as receiving and replying to messages, invoking services, and simple data manipulation as well as structured activities such as sequence and flow that can be hierarchically arranged to create sophisticated business logic.
BPEL depends on WSDL (Web Service Description Language), standardized by W3C. All services that are accessed through BPEL are done so through the abstract interface described in WSDL. Adherence to this abstraction is part of what facilitates easy integration of heterogeneous components in BPEL, because it matters not what language or platform a particular component is implemented with, so long as it exposes its functionality as a service described in a WSDL.
BPEL leverages other Web service standards as well, such as extensible markup language (XML) Schema for a data model and XPath as a query language. In addition to these standards, a number of second-generation Web service standards will become increasingly relevant to BPEL. As these newer standards mature, more explicit ties to BPEL can be expected; covering areas such as reliable messaging and Web service based distributed transactions. The Web service family of specifications thus includes both a core set that is already mature as well as a set of up-and-coming standards for future needs.